Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Yesterday Tamar pointed me to Mr. Doob's excellent new procedural drawing tool, Harmony. It's incredibly simplistic, but it has some unique brushes that allow you to create amazing-looking sketches in a matter of minutes, particularly if you lean towards the abstract. I pulled out my tablet and got hooked on Harmony for a few hours, and thought I'd share some of the sketches I came up with:

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

For what I was going for, the "web" and "shaded" brushes were my favorite. I hope Mr. Doob continues developing Harmony - I know I'd definitely buy a full-featured version of it with hi-res output.

Friday, November 27, 2009

It's been awfully quiet around here - all the activity's on Twitter lately. I've been taking some time to enjoy real life after a finishing a grueling five month world tour with Nine Inch Nails. Now that I'm settled it's time to get started on a number of projects, and get back into illustration, so I hope to be posting here very soon.

In the meantime, this is just a quick note that Monday, November 30th, is the last day to order prints for delivery by Christmas. Of course you can still order prints after Monday, but they may not arrive in time for Christmas.

And speaking of Christmas, for the coming holiday I've re-listed the sold out Presents Opening Children print. I had set a small number of the original edition of 100 aside for future Christmases, and they're available now on the prints page[UPDATE: These are now sold out again!].

And one more note about prints: The price for prints is going to increase a bit starting January 1st, since I'm going to be busier with new projects and it's a lot of time and effort to fulfill all the print orders. To ensure quality I make, pack, and ship every print myself, and the steady stream of orders recently has been fairly time-consuming. So if you want any of the remaining prints at their current prices, be sure to order before the end of the year.

I hope everyone is having a great holiday season, I'm looking forward to a lot more happening around here in the coming months. In the meantime, I've posted more photos here, and be sure to follow me on Twitter for regular updates on other things I've been up to.

Here is the original sketch, and here is the pre-colored outline. While I was working on this I thought I'd lost all my coloring due to a corrupt file and would have to redo hours of work, but Steve from Corel came to the rescue and was able to recover the corrupted Painter file. Huge thanks to him for helping me out there - I've now upgraded to Painter 11 to avoid any file corruption issues in the future. It was long overdue, anyway.

My next task is to finish work on Broken Robot Girls number two and three, so hopefully you'll be seeing those before too long.

I've also been taking a lot of photos while traveling, like this one (click to enlarge):

Thursday, June 11, 2009

As many of you know, I've been pretty busy with my day job, so Sketchblog has yet again fallen to the wayside. However, during my travels I've been slowly forcing myself to do at least a little bit of drawing here and there to break up the monotony. I'm slowly chipping away at the post-production work on Broken Robot Girl #2 and #3, which Tamar and I shot a couple months ago, and last night I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to finally finish an illustration I started last year at the same time I did Ice World (hence the snow):

In other news, the first Broken Robot Girl got a really surprising/exciting amount of coverage, including a page in Popular Photography (wow!) with an interview with Tamar included. LA Weekly also featured it, and asked me some questions. As soon as I have time to finish them, the next photos in the series will be posted here. Oh, and I believe this is the very first Sketchblog-inspired tattoo (based on Troublemaker). I'm immensely flattered.

Lord only knows when the next update will be (hopefully soon?), but please follow me on Twitter to stay in touch in the meantime.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

I'm working on a series of photos of broken robot girls, in collaboration with Tamar Levine. We're hoping to do four or five photos altogether. This is the first one - Tamar took the photo and I did the special effects in Photoshop. We're pretty happy with the way it turned out:

(click to enlarge)

Here's a close-up so you can see some of the details:

(click to enlarge)

For some of the other images in the series, we want the robots to be in much further states of disrepair - missing limbs and things like that. We're looking for someone with some skills in prop-making or fashioning mechanical parts who could help us create some cool-looking bits and pieces of robot joints and insides and other mechanical parts that would be coming out of broken-off limbs and cracked-open joints. If you or someone you know has any crazy sculpting/mechanical skills and might want to help out, drop me a line: rob (at) rob-sheridan (dot) com.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

So, it's been a while. I've spent the last seven months doing a rather excessive amount of traveling, working on a number of exciting projects with Nine Inch Nails, and generally just never getting a chance to sit down and draw - much to my dismay. But over the Christmas break I was up in Seattle during a big snowstorm, and like last year I was inspired by the snowy landscape. This time it was the atmosphere of the wintry Northwest and the layers of trees. So I started on this drawing, but didn't quite finish it up there, and found it quite a bit less inspiring to work on once I returned to the very un-wintry 86 degree weather in Los Angeles. I finally sat down and finished it up last night though, and I'm hoping it will be the first of many more Sketchblog entries in 2009. Drawing more is one of my New Year's resolutions, after all.

I made a wallpaper version, which required some sliding around and cloning of elements so I wouldn't have to crop the image, but it worked out alright.

This proved a nice warm-up and I have a lot of ideas for new prints and sketches, so with any luck there will be some activity around here. Thanks to everyone who's been keeping an eye on this page while it's been dormant - I'm always amazed at how many emails and print orders I get even when I'm neglecting Sketchblog. Remember to subscribe to the RSS feed or the email list (use the form at the bottom of the right-hand column of this page) to get alerts when new things turn up here.

The holiday rush has sold out a couple more prints, and Leaving Town and Cereal Mascot Reunion are getting close to being gone. I'm also, after numerous requests, taking custom orders for prints of other Sketchblog images not specifically listed on the prints page - email prints (at) rob-sheridan.com if there's a specific image you're looking for a print of.

Oh, and if you haven't seen them yet, I put up some new travel photos from Peru and Panama on my tourist page a little while back, and also some fun macro photos of one of my favorite old childhood games over at my Flickr.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

As promised, I've put together a step-by-step overview of how Cereal Mascot Reunion was made, for those of you who are interested in digital art, or just curious about the process. That print was particularly complicated to put together, more so than I think even this step-by-step could portray, so it's a good candidate for this type of breakdown. Hopefully some of you will find it useful:

Friday, May 16, 2008

One of these days I'm going to have some new art to post here, I really am. As soon as I get a million other things done. In the meantime, here are some miscellaneous things:

1. The Downtown Art Walk last week was a lot of fun once again. This time I walked around a bit more and spent some time perusing some of the galleries, and I realized just how absurdly out of place my illustrations are amidst most of the other work. Of course, that actually makes it more fun. After seeing dozens of oil paintings of horses or art school caliber "abstract installations" of painted bicycle parts hanging from ceilings, no one's expecting to see cereal mascots and dead children, so the reactions are often priceless. Anyway, Jennie posted some pics from the Possum Saloon show here.

2. Last month I helped Tamar with a Reebok ad she was shooting for Metro.pop magazine. She was inspired by my Robot Block Party image and felt the aesthetic would fit perfectly with the, er, colorful shoes. The end result is the second page spread in this month's issue, and it looks really great, especially considering how hideous those shoes are. Click the thumbnail below to see the full sized image over on Tamar's site:

3. Since I've been playing with Facebook a bit recently, I broke down and made a Facebook page. Aside from being a lot easier to update than my in-need-of-renovation portfolio, it will quell the anxiety of those who keep asking me why I don't have a Facebook page. Please add me if you use Facebook, my newborn page is sad and lonely at the moment.

4. I felt guilty making another post without any artwork, so I did this little one-minute doodle:

I like drawing things without thinking much about them, then trying to piece together all the subconscious influences that went into them. In this one I'm reminded of the wonderful Isz from Sam Keith's The Maxx, which I used to love once upon a time. There's also some Piranha Plant in there, and some of the creatures from the great first Oddworld game on Playstation, and some Ankylosaurus from this old dinosaur book that I had when I was a kid, pre-Jurassic Park when bipedal dinosaurs were still depicted standing upright with their tails dragging on the ground. Ah, those were the days.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

So once again I've been extremely busy, as some of you know, but I have some new sketches in the works so there should be some activity around here in the near future.

In the meantime, my friends at the Possum Saloon gallery have turned last month's show into a regular event, which will happen every month starting this Thursday in conjunction with the Downtown LA Artwalk. As before, it'll be an eclectic group of artists displaying work, and some bands and DJs performing as well. It's completely free, and there will even be free wine until it runs out. They asked me once again to include some work, but it was kind of last-minute so I'll only have a few prints up this time. I'm actually not familiar with any of the other artists except Tamar, so it should be interesting. Either way, if you're in the LA area you should definitely come down, the Artwalk is a lot of fun.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

For some reason this image has been swimming around in my head for a few years now, and finally - after chipping away at it bit by bit over the last couple months - I've brought it to life as a large, absurdly detailed print. It's kind of about the strange, uncomfortable feeling of reuniting with old friends only to find that the magic just isn't there anymore - and in turn, about the melancholy "nothing will ever be as good as it used to be" type of nostalgia, of which I am increasingly fond. And of course, a tribute to the late, great, wood-paneled, shag-carpeted 1970's rec room.

In other news, I polished up a couple images to get them print-ready for the Possum Saloon show last week, so now Headache and Miscarriage are available as prints. I'm also now offering smaller 11" x 17" sizes on some of the prints, for those who don't want the full size.